


From One Room Into Another

by ByJuniper



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Character Death, Ghost Shane Madej, Human Ryan Bergara, M/M, Murder, Ryan still works at Buzzfeed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 18:35:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17268929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ByJuniper/pseuds/ByJuniper
Summary: Shane is a ghost in need of a pastime. Ryan is a ghost hunter in need of a ghost. Somehow between the two of them, it's still Ryan who's the believer.





	From One Room Into Another

**Author's Note:**

> "Death is no more than passing from one room into another."  
> \--Helen Keller

Being dead wasn't that different from being alive, except that during his brief and uneventful life Shane had never been cornered by the spirit of Karl Marx while floating somewhere around the ceiling of a gas station bathroom.

On the other hand, it wasn't the first time that a weirdo wanted to talk the meaning of life out while some nearby strangers had illicit and unhygienic bathroom stall sex. After all, Shane had lived in LA for a while--just long enough that the pinnacle of his career as aspiring sound editor was holding a boom mic on several episodes of an HBO comedy that never actually told a joke. But the point is, he’d lived in LA. Been worldly and all that. At least he hadn't been murdered during the Schaumberg years. For one, that would have robbed four years from his already too short life. For another, if one must die, at the very least one must first Live.

"Thank you, Karl, for that thought," Shane said politely, while mostly hiding in the ceiling. Karl Marx, who had never really been interested in Shane's presence nor particularly cared if Shane was there to listen, continued speaking on the importance of living while alive. It was a bit late for that lecture, Shane thought, but he also thought that his admittedly sparse knowledge of Karl Marx had lead him to believe that the man might have better things to do with his afterlife than lingering as a wistful cloud of purple energy and trite philosophy in southern California bathroom. Marx had been dead for a while now, though. People got weird after a few decades of death. Shane hoped that he wouldn't get weird, but on the other hand, he'd also been hanging out in the bathroom so maybe ship had already sailed.

Unlike Karl Marx, though, Shane had a reason for his loitering. And despite the couple currently groaning against the dingy wall beneath him, the reason that wasn't ghostly voyeurism (the guilty thrill of watching strangers have sex had faded within the first weeks after death, mostly because the living world was overfilled with strangers having sex while you drifted through their kitchen but also because Shane's libido had decayed along with any organs that might have made use of it). No, the reason Shane was watching this particular coupling had nothing to do with the people involved, and everything to do with what the couple in their impressively acrobatic passion had failed thus far to notice was by their feet.

Hopefully they wouldn't. It was hard enough to interact with the physical matter of the living world; it would be impossible to wrestle it from a living person if they decided to pick it up first. As it was, Shane was already banking on Marx being the one doing the heavy lifting here. People got weird after a few decades, but they also got stronger. Shane had been dead for nine years and the pinnacle of his solo ghost adventures was the time he managed to make a pencil roll off a desk. His mother hadn't even had the courtesy to be comforted by it. Not that Shane could blame her. He didn't want her mourning, god no, not like this, not because of what happened, but since he also couldn't imagine her not mourning the untimely and violent death of her best child, he was at least selfishly comforted that her grief couldn't be interrupted by a pencil drop.

He'd been trying to write a note. Stupid, it was a stupid thought, if ghosts could do that kind of thing, people would know about ghosts, but he'd tried anyway until he felt so tired that he started wondering if he could die a second time. He all that effort to write one word, just one, anything to say _don’t worry, I’m fine, it’s fine, death’s fine,_ the kind of lies that he’d been so good at telling her during life when she asked him how Hollywood was going. He rolled the pencil instead. And his mother kept crying.

So he'd settled for embracing her, the way that ghosts embrace. He'd held her with his ghostly arms, the kind of way that sons should never have to cradle mothers, comfort for the kind of grief mothers shouldn't have, and her pain erased the borders of himself. He became something looser, fuzzier, the way he did when he forgot to think about himself and his two arms and two legs drifted into something more like fog or like dust in sunlight. He didn't usually let himself fade like that for long. It felt nothing like dying again (dying had not been gentle, and the fade was the gentlest feeling Shane had ever known), but it did feel like transformation, which was basically dying by a different name. But with his mother, wrapping her and wrapped in her, he'd forgotten himself and so his self had forgotten him. For the first time since his death, he drifted without thought, until he was the shape of nothing and the size of the room, his room, his childhood bedroom that his mother didn't know how to pack up and didn't know if she ever could or should. And then he was larger even than that, larger and lesser, the molecules of his being diffusing to everywhere in the world that his molecules weren't.

It was like the last breaths of a dying man. Shane would know. If he hadn’t come back to himself, literally pulled himself together and fled that room, that house, that grief and love that beckoned him to go towards the light or to rest or whatever people said when they just wanted the dead to die, then he would have been gone. Truly gone. Whatever comes after death.

Death was a lot like life. You spent most of it worried about what happened next. And like life, it was easy, far too easy, to let yourself slip into whatever followed.

The couple having sex in the bathroom made some noises that indicated they were now done having sex in the bathroom. “Finally,” Shane said to no one who could hear him as the couple tucked themselves back away. They gave each other shy smiles as they did so. That didn’t seem very hook-up-y. Not that Shane had ever been super into public bathroom sex with anyone in his life (he’d died before ever getting a Tinder, how’s that for a tragedy), but he figured illicit, emotionless bathroom sex involved less furtive giggling afterwards.

He clapped his ghostly hands at them. They did not notice. “Please leave the bathroom,” he said. They continued to not notice. “Help me out here, Karl,” Shane requested. Karl did not notice. “Can’t wait to be a poltergeist,” Shane muttered, although there was no point muttering since no one listened to him even when he bellowed. “People respect poltergeists. Good old ghostly temper tantrum, that’s what I need.”

“Violent ghostly activity is the riddle of history solved,” said Karl Marx, who it must be said only intermittently resembled  or sounded like the man and mostly looked like a spiral of shimmering light that coiled upon itself like a snake eating its own tail and the snake was also a tornado. He also sometimes looked like several other people, all at once, and it occurred to Shane that this might be a ghost conglomerate. Or maybe a ghost collective. He wasn't sure the exact language Marx would prefer. 

The horny, loving couple washed their hands, which Shane appreciated (the inherent voyeurism of being dead quickly disillusions you on the state of public hygiene). They smiled at each other again. They did not look down at the floor. They did not see the fat blue leather square by their feet. Shane held his breath, mostly for luck but admittedly also because he no longer needed to breathe even if he still found himself doing it out of habit.

And the couple, at last, left.

“Godspeed,” Shane said to their retreating backs. “Y’all nasty.”

He swooped down to the floor by the sink and hovered over reason for the season. The wallet had two hundred dollars cash in it. Shane had watched the cash come out of the ATM, be counted, be folded and tucked away in a wallet that, it must be said, was still slightly haunted by the cow who’d died to make it. (Ghost animals were _everywhere_ , Shane had learned quickly in his afterlife. They mostly acted like living animals did except you couldn’t pet them very well and they all could fly. All of them. they didn’t retain their forms long after death, but you hadn’t lived--so to speak--until you’d seen the ghost of a horse dive bomb the living form of their favorite rider.)

“Karl, buddy, why don’t you help me seize the means of production?” Shane asked.

The amorphous cloud that was the deceased soul of Karl Marx but also some other ghosts sharing one ghostly form in the ultimate co-op didn’t have eyes at the moment. Shane nevertheless got the sense that it was glaring at him.  

“Sorry,” Shane said, more meekly. “Could you help me?”

He pointed to the wallet. After a moment, the cloud of ghost energy that was the father of Communism (and again, possibly some extra randos) drifted towards Shane. It poured itself into him, into whatever vessel he still was, and Shane wondered again what he must look like as memories of a German boyhood played again the back of Shane’s mind like a movie projected in an empty theater for the sole benefit of the projectionist. It was a little like losing himself again, this merging, this sharing. The power could have been intoxicating if it would leave behind enough of Shane to be intoxicated.

Shane swallowed his fear, pushed it down but not away, and spread what he thought of as his fingers to the wallet. He didn’t have fingers anymore, no matter how he liked to pretend, but something closed around the wallet. He could feel the heat of it, not a heat that a living person would have felt, but a heat stronger and sweeter. It felt like the pocket it lived in. It wanted to return home, thank God. Shane couldn’t have done this if the wallet put up a fight.

If a living person entered the room now, Shane didn’t know what they would see. The wallet rising in the air. The wallet vanishing. Whatever it was, Shane--and mostly the generously lent power of Karl Marx--had picked the wallet up.

“Thank you,” he said to the energy that had once been a soul and now was not anything, was just what had replied when Shane had called out for aid for the stupidest use of his energy in a while. He held the wallet. Something from another world, and he held it. In what you might call his hands.

Then Shane closed what you might call his eyes. At least, he thought about closing his eyes, and upon thinking that, he had eyes and they were closed. Thoughts became actions and truths after death. Which was dangerous. And tended to teleport you all around the world until you got the knack for thinking without thinking, which was hard to explain and mostly like when you scrolled through your Twitter feed without actually reading it and suddenly three hours have passed. Life as a ghost was mostly that, horrifyingly.

Thankfully, Shane had something to think on these days. Someone.

Shane clasped the wallet and thought, as was quickly becoming habit, of Ryan Bergara.

 

* * *

 

About thirty miles east, Ryan Bergara had still not noticed his wallet was missing as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and tried not to think about ghosts. He failed. He usually did. He'd pitched a show involving, among other things, ghosts, and that required thinking about them and where they might be and how he could find them. The thoughts brought him the same kind of pleasure that you might get running a thumb over the blade of a freshly sharpened knife. It was a sort of tightness in the bottom of your gut, the tension between the harm that you might do to yourself and the relief that you thus far had not. It wasn't exactly fun. But Ryan was not doing this for fun. He was doing this for the art. He was doing this for passion. He was doing this because the idea interested him as no other idea he'd pitched had even come close to.

But mostly, at this particular moment, he was doing it for money. Which (as the drifting and amorphous cloud that had once been Karl Marx would be happy to explain) drove men to behave contrary to their true nature and their best interests in pursuit of capital with no intrinsic worth but whose extrinsic value condemned generations of men to miserable lives and early deaths. ("Ain't it so," Shane had muttered upon hearing this, although Shane had been thinking exclusively about how bullshit his last rental lease had been.) Ryan wasn't even doing this to earn money for himself--lost wallet aside, which Ryan still had not noticed, he'd never had more money than he did at this moment. This was not to say that Ryan had a lot of money (when he was not thinking about ghosts, he was thinking about how bullshit his current rental lease was), but as he made internet videos about soup cleanses and snail facials, he thought he was doing well for himself. And if this series did well, he might do even better for himself. Eventually. But at the moment, that wasn't going to happen unless the show got more ambitious. Which meant more money. Which meant convincing the people who financed his internet videos about soup cleanses and snail facials that they ought to give him more money. Which meant showing them that the money would make a show that would in turn make them more money than Ryan could ever make them while just sitting at a desk with whatever cohost was free that day. Which meant, somehow, ghosts.

"We could go on location," Ryan had argued to Laura, one of the lower and more sympathetic executives as she smiled politely and tried to leave the staff kitchen with her coffee. "We could tell the story where the story happened, get some really great footage, maybe even--"

"Hunt ghosts?" she had finished for him. She didn't say it insultingly, but Ryan prickled anyway. He got prickly when people talked about ghosts. He knew it was a problem. They'd mentioned it in his last performance review.

"Ghost hunting is a popular genre," Ryan said yet again. This time, thankfully, Ryan stopped himself before listing examples. Upon reflection, he'd decided that it hadn't helped his case to list his experience watching Ghost Hunt, Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters Academy,Ghost Hunters International, Ghost Adventures, Most Haunted, My Haunted House, Haunted Towns, The Haunted, Ghost Brothers, Ghost Lab, Ghost Mine, Ghost Stalkers, Haunted Highway, Haunted Collecter, Haunted USA, Haunting Evidence, Paranormal Challenge, Paranormal Lockdown, Paranormal Paparazzi, Paranormal State, Paranormal State: The New Class, Paranormal Witness, Deep South Paranormal, Extreme Paranormal, Paranormal Challenge, Celebrity Paranormal Project, Celebrity Ghost Stories, Wrestling with Ghosts, Rescue Mediums, and Buzzfeed Unsolved.

The executives had pointed out that he couldn't cite his own show as part of his market research for his own show, especially considering that episodes of Buzzfeed Unsolved struggled to crack 40k views which was like. Bad. That was a bad low amount of views.

Which was why the argument for more money for the show was not going great.

"Look," said Laura, giving up and giving in to the conversation, "you're not going to get the budget you want. Not with the views you're pulling in. You'll be lucky if you finish out the episodes you've already pitched."

None of this had been new information to Ryan, but it still stung to hear. Especially from one of the people who was in charge of deciding whether he would indeed be lucky enough. "It's a good show," Ryan said, and mostly believed it. It could be a good show. He knew that. Everyone knew that. It's just that at the moment, it was not.

"I believe that you believe in it," Laura said diplomatically. "And for what it's worth, I think you're right. You need to do something big to draw in eyes, and you'll need to work a bigger crew and a location to do that. It's just hard right now to justify diverting that money and resources from surefire things to...less established shows."

"Surefire things used to be less established shows," Ryan had pointed out.

"Yeah, but usually after as many episodes as you've had, those shows have been at least a little established." Laura gave Ryan the kind of blunt yet pitying look he usually got after he talked about Unsolved for too long. You'd think he'd be used to it. "Why don't you shoot lower for now? Find a consistent cohost. Get a good rapport. Then we'll talk."

Then, before Ryan had been able to respond, Laura took advantage of his momentary shock over being offered a lifeline and darted out of the kitchen.

Ryan knew he needed a cohost. He'd had Brent for a while but Brent hadn't been interested in continuing, especially in the face of the lukewarm reaction from both the audience and the execs to the show. And Ryan had plenty of friends in the company, and they were happy to sub in for an episode or two, but they were also happy not to be asked. They didn't care about the show either way, except in that they cared about Ryan and that wasn't what Ryan needed. None of them had been right. Ryan could tell that within minutes each time they started filming. He wasn't sure what right would feel like, but as much as he liked Kelsey and Stephen and Jen, he knew it wasn't them.

And maybe the perfect is the enemy of the good, but since "good" was about to get his show cancelled, Ryan didn’t have much reason to compromise his vision.

(He wasn't one hundred percent what his vision was, but that was all the more reason not to water it down.)

So he couldn't have a cohost, not yet, not until he found the right one. And he couldn't get the budget for a bigger show until he justified the budget for a bigger show which was a problem because without a bigger show he might not have any show at all. But Ryan had been hustling long before he came to Buzzfeed, as several hopefully forgotten early youtube videos showed, and he had spent enough time on amateur film shoots to learn how to fake money where there wasn't any. What would a budget buy him? Locations and a crew. Why did he want those? So he could find ghosts. He'd spent too long on the what and not enough on the why. He could find ghosts without a sound guy and a cameraman. He could get to a location without having his travel expenses reimbursed. He had a smartphone, a GoPro, a tripod, and hundreds of hours of ghost hunting shows to draw upon.

So he'd taken a week's vacation, which was all his remaining vacation, and he'd borrowed his brother's sleeping bag and his friend's night vision camera, and he'd pulled up the list of locations he'd so disastrously pitched. He’d meet the ghosts where they were. He’d find proof of what he’d always known was true, what others refused to believe. Ghosts were real. Buzzfeed Unsolved was a good show. How hard could it be to capture both those facts on camera?

When Ryan reached the next gas station, lonely and neon at the entrance to the desert, he felt at last the emptiness of his back pocket, and he thought, _oh god, oh god, the last stop, the bathroom, taking my wallet out to wash my hands, why did I take my wallet out to wash my hands, two hundred dollars and my cards, my license, why did I do that, why the fuck--_ and then he looked at the passenger seat. And there was his wallet.

 _I didn’t put that there,_ was not what Ryan thought. What he thought, and said, was, “Oh my fucking god, thank you, holy shit.”

If anyone told him he was welcome, Ryan didn’t hear, and the empty desert, which like all the places of the earth and the sky was not empty at all, kept whatever it heard to itself.


End file.
